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Kurfürstendamm

playground and battlefield of Weimar Berlin

The history of the Kurfürstendamm, known as the Ku’damm, can be traced back hundreds of years. As early as 1542, Kurfürst Joachim II marked out a track to connect the royal hunting grounds of the Tiergarten to the large forests of the Grunewald. The track became a road and over the years it expanded and developed, but it wasn’t until the 1870s that a plan to create a boulevard to match the splendour of Paris’s Avenue des Champs-Élysées was fully conceived. Funding for the venture was provided by a consortium of banks and businesses, however it was the establishment of a colony of millionaire villas in the Grunewald that secured its future. The 53 meter-wide avenue was laid-out in 1883, although it was the opening of a steam-tram line from the Zoo to Halensee, in 1886, that truly saw the birth of the boulevard.

The first part of the Ku’damm to be established is now known as Budapester Straße, and runs from the Landwehrkanal to the Zoo. It was lined with five-storey apartment houses and the magnificent Hotel Eden. By the turn of the 20th century the remaining, and most substantial, section of the Ku’damm had been completed, from the Zoo to Halensee.

The boulevard was not destined to be the exclusive preserve of the elite. Artists, architects, scientists, writers and musicians were changing the world, and the tastes and conventions of Imperial Germany were beginning to look outdated and stale in this rapidly-evolving new century. Cafes, restaurants, shops, cabarets and theatres sprung up along its length and in surrounding streets, challenging the old order of the established historic centre of Berlin, which lay to the east, and creating a new, vibrant, cultural focus in the west.

The Ku’damm became the shop-front for this new era. Established businesses from elsewhere in the city opened branches in the street often taking a daring, moreinternational approach. The concept of the ‘department store’ had been born and was growing in popularity. Pavements became catwalks for the emerging fashions of the time, observed by the crowds thronging the cafes lining the avenue.

This first, golden era of the Ku’damm was short-lived, for the world was soon at war.

By November 1918, everything had changed. Imperial Germany had been defeated in a long and devastating conflict, resulting in the abdication of the Kaiser andthe declaration of a new Republic. The early months of this new Republic saw Berlin streets turned into battlegrounds; whilst political leaders jostled for power, a communist revolution was under way and by the time of democratic elections in January of 1919, 2,000 Berliners had been killed. The fledgling government was forced to flee the city and assemble 280 kilometres south-east, in the historic town of Weimar, to draft the new constitution that bore its name and changed the lives of the people of Germany.

By 1920, Berlin was the third largest city in the world and the largest in Europe. The Greater Berlin Act had encompassed all the surrounding neighbourhoods and suburbs, and overnight the population more than doubled, to 4.5 million – the most populous the city has ever been. This exciting, bustling city boasted 120 newspapers, 40 theatres, and a wealth of cinemas and cabarets. The abolition of censorship enabled anything – and everything – to thrive.

The Kurfürstendamm bounced back, stronger than ever. The ground floors of apartment buildings lining the street were now almost exclusively used for commercial premises, the front gardens converted into cafe terraces, and some of the ornate plaster-work of the upper floors removed to provide additional advertising space. Class barriers had melted away and all sections of society happily rubbed shoulders on this expensive, wildly popular boulevard.

To have a residential address on the Ku’damm – even a fourth-floor walk-up in a rear block or ‘Hinterhaus’ – was to be seen to have succeeded.

As the 1920s roared on, resentment and hatred toward the new republican society grew. The catastrophic hyper-inflation of 1922 had wiped out the incomes and life savings of ordinary Berliners and left hundreds of thousands in poverty. In the west of the city, the decadent Ku’damm, accused of being ‘too American’, andof promoting ‘un-German’ values, was often the target for this rage. Demonstrations, rallies and even riots were more frequent, as successive governments foundered and fragile coalitions failed.

The loudest voices to be heard were those of the increasingly popular far right. In March 1927, the rising National Socialist (Nazi) party, under its local leaderJoseph Goebbels, sent 600 men to the Ku’damm in a show of strength. The Romanisches Café was attacked and ransacked, and guests and passers-by were beaten. Another attack, in 1931, saw 1,500 Nazi party supporters take to the Ku’damm at Jewish New Year, shouting anti-semitic slogans and attacking people as they left a synagogue. Jewish-run businesses were targeted and their customers assaulted.

In April 1933, with the Nazi Party in power and Adolf Hitler the Chancellor, a boycott of Berlin’s Jewish businesses began, focused on the shops and department stores of the Ku’damm.

The ominous presence of this new far right government lifted slightly as the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games neared. The Nazis wanted the city to be seen to be welcoming to visitors attending the Games, to appear modern, cosmopolitan, European and inclusive. It was an illusion. Beggars and the homeless had been removed from the streets and interned in work camps on the outskirts of the city. That summer there were as many Olympic flags as swastikas flying from buildings on the Ku’damm. For a while, the facade of peace and enjoyment returned to the street and some flavour of the mid-1920s re-surfaced.

It was not to last. The Nazis hated the Ku’damm and everything it represented.

Many of the stars of its theatres and cabarets had already fled the country and their venues had been ‘aryanised’. Some writers and artists managed to flee to other European countries and the United States, but where could the ordinary Berliners go, and what would happen to their homes and businesses if they fled?

On the night of November 9th 1938, the homes, shops and businesses of Jewish people on the Ku’damm and throughout the country were targeted and systematically destroyed: 100 people were killed and 30,000 imprisoned. It would come to be known as Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass), and signalled the beginning of a pogrom against certain sections of society considered undesirable in a National Socialist Germany.

Within a year, the country was at war for the second time in a generation.

Like so much of the city, the Kurfürstendamm was left in rubble by the bombing and subsequent fires of World War II. From the now-destroyed Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche to the remains of Halensee, only 43 of the 235 buildings were habitable by 1945, the other 192 were completely destroyed. By the end of the conflict the Ku’damm had been used as a runway for fighter aircraft and had been one of the last lines of defence of the city, as Russian army tanks rolled up the boulevard from the bridge at Halensee, heading for bunkers in the Tiergarten, and onwards to the Reichstag.

The desperate need for housing and food following the end of the war was matched by a voracious hunger for entertainment, culture and some sense of a return to normality in the shattered city.

As early as May 1945, the newly appointed Commandant of Berlin, General Nikolai Berzarin, decreed that cinemas, theatres, cabarets and sports arenas, all closed by law a year earlier, should be reopened wherever possible, even with the 9pm curfew that had been imposed. By June, cabaret shows had resumed in Cafe Leon, at the site of the former KaDeKo club; The Theater des Westens had a ballet programme running in repertory, and movies were again being screened at the Marmorhaus and the Astor Kino. Restaurants had begun emerging from the rubble and pavement cafes flourished once again.

The Komödie am Kurfürstendamm reopened in March 1946, followed a year later by its neighbour the Theater am Kurfürstendamm in December 1947.

Some ambitious city planners saw the destruction of the war as an opportunity to re-invent the boulevard – a chance to create something brave and modern. However the task was so huge, and the planning and building consent process so slow, that many opportunities went unrealised. Often, structures only designed as temporary replacements, in the salvageable ruins of existing buildings and gap sites, remained in place for decades.

By the early 1950s, the rebuilding of the Ku’damm was well under way, giving rise to many of the buildings in existence today.

The relocation of the Berlinale film festival from its first home in suburban Steglitz to the cinemas of the Ku’damm, in 1952, brought a little of the feel of the ‘Golden Twenties’ back to the boulevard over the next few years. For fourteen days in the Spring, movie stars walked the red carpets to the delight of the watching crowds, but it could not be denied that the glory days of Berlin’s most glamorous boulevard were behind it.

Yet, like the Weimar Era itself, the only constant feature of the Ku’damm is change.